End Of Life Platform Out To Raise $1 Trillion For Charity

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Jenny Xia and Patrick Schmitt cofounded FreeWill together in 2016. At the time, both were still MBA students at Stanford.

Katie Rowe

Once upon a time, a stigma followed end of life planning. Regarded as an arduous process, settling the details of an estate conjured up images of mind-numbing meetings with attorneys and whopping price tags. Such a notion could explain why, up until now, fewer than 30-percent of Americans have gotten around to making wills in their lifetimes. Even less is the 5-percent of individuals who include charitable donations in their estate planning.

Those numbers are likely to change, and quickly. Thanks to FreeWill, an online estate planning software, more than 21,000 wills have been created through their tool, with upwards of $252 million committed to nonprofit causes. Cofounder and co-CEO of FreeWill, Jenny Xia, who was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs list in 2019, reveals why the emerging startup is on pace to achieve their goal of getting $1 trillion to charities in the next decade.

Xia says that three times more people give twice the average amount through the free service, resulting in a sixfold increase in giving. A typical user on their system is a middle-class homeowner who donates up to 10 percent of their estate, which plays a part in the higher median sum. The other contributing factor is that it's completely free, driving people to make plans and give in the process.

Annual projections show no sign of slowing down. Xia shares that by the end of 2018 they expect to clear $300 million in charitable donations and reach 25,000 wills. A year from now, they anticipate having more than tripled that, with $1 billion bequests and 100,000 wills. But what’s the reason for the massive uptake in usage and donor amounts? The company’s co-CEO points to how the tool is the only one like it on the market. The norm, she says, is for charitable giving not to be raised in estate planning conversations.

“What we really wanted to do is to make something that was previously considered complex or scary or expensive into something warm, intuitive and free.” Xia observes that by doing so, “thinking about death is a really beautiful moment” because it makes a person step back and reassess what matters most in life and legacy.

Another draw for users is simplicity. FreeWill works a little like this: an individual signs up online, creates a will and arranges a donation (if desired), all within minutes from home. From there, the legal document needs to be witnessed and notarized. The cost of creating a will is absorbed by the 80 current charities partnered with the brand, who pay a set amount in turn for receiving funding through the tool.

Xia remembers when her cofounder and co-CEO Patrick Schmitt approached her with his brainchild: software that would make charitable giving and estate plans effortless. At the time, she was only 26 years old and she and Schmitt were MBA graduate students at Stanford. Now 28, Xia's out of school and moving full-speed ahead with their philanthropic mission. “The thing that most excited me about this is that it takes a fundamental human instinct that both Patrick and I believe in, which is to be good and to do good, and it just makes it really easy to do that.”